Peter Mandler

Against ‘Englishness’: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850–1940

OVER the last fifteen years, a substantial literature has welled up, practically from nowhere, purporting to anatomise ‘Englishness’. ‘Englishness’, this literature suggests, is not a true estimate of national character, an enduring national essence, but rather a historical construct that was developed towards the end of the nineteenth century by the ‘dominant classes’ in British society in order to tame or thwart the tendencies of their day towards modernism, urbanism and democracy that might otherwise have overwhelmed elite culture. These aspirations for social control determined the lineaments of the new ‘Englishness’. Nostalgic, deferential and rural, ‘Englishness’ identified the squire-archical village of Southern or ‘Deep’ England as the template on which the national character had been formed and thus the ideal towards which it must inevitably return. Purveyed by the ‘dominant classes’ to the wider culture by means of a potent array of educational and political instruments—ranging from the magazine Country Life to the folk-song fad to the National Trust to Stanley Baldwins radio broadcasts—‘Englishness’ reversed the modernising thrust of the Indus-trial Revolution and has condemned late twentieth-century Britain to economic decline, cultural stagnation and social division.

The Problem with Cultural History

(2004). The Problem with Cultural History. Cultural and Social History: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 94-117.

Aristocratic government in the Age of Reform : Whigs and Liberals, 1830-1852

Introduction: Whiggism and the age of reform Whiggism and Liberalism, 1780-1850 Aristocratic styles in the age of reform: I. Whigs Aristocratic styles in the age of reform: II. Liberals and Moderates Part two: Aristocratic government in the age of reform: Coalition government, 1830-1834 Whig government, 1835-1841 Whig opposition, 1841-1846 The last Whig government, 1846-1852 Epilogue and conclusion: Whiggery in an age of Liberalism

WHAT IS “NATIONAL IDENTITY”? DEFINITIONS AND APPLICATIONS IN MODERN BRITISH HISTORIOGRAPHY

“National identity” is one of those concepts, like “political culture”, which historians have somewhat casually borrowed from the social sciences and then used promiscuously for their own purposes. Over twenty years ago Philip Gleason wrote a wise and prescient (yet sadly underappreciated) essay on the origins of the concept of “identity” in the 1950s, warning historians that already then it had two quite distinct—psychological and sociological—meanings that needed to be distinguished to retain any conceptual clarity. Since then our own use of it has proliferated uncontrollably, and the original confusion identified by Gleason has been compounded by many others. The chain of communication between the concepts progenitors and its present-day users is now so long and so fragmentary that our usage may bear little or no relation to the discourse that Gleason described. There may be nothing wrong with this state of affairs; historians may have found their own value in the term, which need not necessarily be validated by social science. Yet social scientists have continued to work with “identity”, and have puzzled much further over its possible meaning and utility with a degree of conceptual rigour that historians do not usually share. And we continue to validate our own use of the term by reference to an increasingly shadowy and distant social science whence it came. Accordingly it may be useful to look more closely at what social scientists think “national identity” is, and how it operates in human minds and societies. This essay attempts a brief exploration of that kind and then applies its findings to the recent historiography of “national identity” in modern Britain.

From plunder to preservation: Britain and the heritage of empire, c.1800-1940

PART I: INTRODUCTION PART II: THE CLASSICAL WORLD PART III: THE BIBLICAL WORLD PART IV: EMPIRES AND CIVILISATIONS PART V: THE NEW WORLD

Educating the Nation: I. Schools

This paper assays the public discourse on secondary education across the twentieth century – what did voters think they wanted from education and how did politicians seek to cater to those desires? The assumption both in historiography and in popular memory is that educational thinking in the post-war decades was dominated by the ideal of ‘meritocracy’ – that is, selection for secondary and higher education on the basis of academic ‘merit’. This paper argues instead that support for ‘meritocracy’ in this period was fragile. After 1945, secondary education came to be seen as a universal benefit, a function of the welfare state analogous to health. Most parents of all classes wanted the ‘best schools’ for their children, and the best schools were widely thought to be the grammar schools; thus support for grammar schools did not imply support for meritocracy, but rather for high-quality universal secondary education. This explains wide popular support for comprehensivisation, so long as it was portrayed as providing ‘grammar schools for all’. Since the 1970s, public discourse on education has focused on curricular control, ‘standards’ and accountability, but still within a context of high-quality universal secondary education, and not the ‘death of the comprehensive’.

After the Victorians : private conscience and public duty in modern Britain : essays in memory of John Clive

P.F. Clarke, St Johns College, Cambridge Jeffrey Cox, University of Iowa Seth Koven, Villanova University D.L. LeMahieu, Lake Forest College F.M. Leventhal, Boston University Standish Meacham, University of Texas Simon Schama, Center for European Studies, Harvard Peter Stansky, Stanford University Chris Waters, Williams College

Educating the Nation II: Universities

This paper continues the argument made in ‘Educating the Nation: I. Schools’, that democratic demand for ever widening access to education was the principal driver for expansion in the second half of the twentieth century. Demand for higher education was not as universalistic or egalitarian as demand for secondary schooling; nevertheless, it was pressing, especially from the late 1950s, and ultimately irresistible, enshrined in the ‘Robbins principle’ that higher education should be available to all qualified by ability and attainment. The paper tracks the fortunes of the Robbins principle from an initial period of rapid growth, through a mysterious period of sagging demand in the 1970s and 1980s, to the resumption of very rapid growth from the late 1980s. It remains the guiding light of higher-education policy today, though in very altered circumstances where the price is paid ultimately more by beneficiaries than from the public purse.

Educating the Nation: III. Social Mobility

This address asks how much has education contributed to social mobility in post-war Britain and considers other factors that may have contributed as much or more: labour-market opportunities, trends in income inequality, gender differences and ‘compositional effects’ deriving from the shape of the occupational hierarchy. Even where these other factors proved much more powerful – especially labour-market opportunities and compositional effects – democratic discourse both among politicians and among the electorate remained fixated on educational opportunities and outcomes, especially after the decline of the Croslandite critique of ‘meritocracy’. That fixation has if anything been reinforced by the apparent end to a ‘golden age’ of absolute upward mobility for large sections of the population, not necessarily because education is an effective antidote but because the alternative political solutions are so unpalatable both to politicians and to voters.

The Language of Social Science in Everyday Life

An ethnographic or ethnomethodological turn in the history of the human sciences has been a Holy Grail at least since Cooter and Pumphrey called for it in 1994, but it has been little realized in p...